5/22/2012

Marley: The Man and His Music

This is how you capture the life and legacy of a man film! A
sprawling musical-documentary epic, Marley
makes the rare feat of depicting the life of an artist from birth to death, all
the while offering a comprehensive report on the singer and the impact of his
work. Sure to please devoted fans of the reggae superstar as well as viewers (like
me) with little knowledge of the man save for the anecdotes that accompany his
songs on the radio, Marley is a great
film.

Marley begins with
a long aerial shot of the Jamaica’s St. Ann parish. The lush, rambling landscape
takes us to the small mountainside village of Nine Mile where Bob Marley was
born. As his mother explains to the camera, Bob was conceived when a sixty-year
old man from the British army took an interest in a young Jamaican girl. The
father, Norval Marley, was a strange, elusive man and he abandoned the mother
and child shortly thereafter.

It’s this mixed parentage, though, that helped develop the
passion and insight that marked much of Bob Marley’s music. Bob’s mother and
several of his childhood friends and later collaborators tell of Bob’s struggle
to fit in amidst the racial tensions simmering in Jamaica. A half-black,
half-white child, Bob was seen as a ‘half-caste’, or as an outsider who wasn’t
really accepted from either party. As an outsider to much of the politics and
currents in Jamaica, then, Marley developed a strong sense of introspection
that came in handy later on. Marley’s mother, unwilling to let her son be burdened
by a lack of opportunity, soon moved the family to Kingston. It was there,
living in the slums of Trench Town that Bob Marley decided to turn to music
when so many of his neighbours turned to crime and/or violence to escape a bad
situation. As an outsider living among outsiders, Marley and his friends used
music to give Trench Town a unique voice.

In its brief, but hardly abbreviated summation of Marley’s beginnings,
Marley outlines clearly the world
from which the man and the music emerged. Almost like a sociological
exploration of music – it’s much like a great episode of HBO’s Treme – Marley takes the viewer through a thorough, harmonious odyssey of
the philosophy that filled Marley’s work. Director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) offers
numerous interviews with many of Marley’s fellow musicians, including members
of his band The Wailers, and his peers proudly explain how Marley pioneered
something new with his music by collaborating and finding a distinct style that
spoke to an audience while offering a poetic outlet for Jamaica.

Although much of the film offers nostalgic and affectionate
remembrances from Marley’s musical family, it also uses their stories to
portray a restless, conflicted man who struggled with numerous personal crises.
Marley’s peers explain how the musician discovered himself through the Rastafarian
movement, which also helped iconize Marley through images of the reggae
superstar smoking a giant roll of ganja. The film gives valuable insight into
Marley’s devotion to Rastafarianism, and it explains how his faith infused
itself into the mellow serenity of his songs. Especially with its in-depth
explanation of the Rasta philosophy does Marley
beautifully connect Marley’s music back to its worldly implications: the film
opens with a brief tour of a slave prison in Africa, which the camera exits
through the fated “Door of No Return” before the film cuts to the aforementioned
aerial shot of Jamaica. With this opening frame, the ensuing narrative is very much
a story of emancipation – namely, how Bob Marley found himself by immersing
himself in music, which in turn inspired peace and a cultural revolution with
how greatly it resonated with fans around the world.

The film includes some archival footage of Marley himself
both in performances and in interviews, so the film grants the musician some
authority even those most of the speaking is done by his close friends and
family. Marley is actually so well
assembled that the reggae-man feels tangibly present. The film offers an
exhaustive array of photographs and found footage – it’s hard to imagine that
any image of the star fails to appear in the film. Every fact, song, and photo
is meticulously collated in a beautiful montage of records and recollections. Although
Marley clocks in at whopping 144
minutes, not a moment feels misused or wasted. Thanks to Macdonald’s commendable
efforts and the impressive range of research on display, all of which are
preserved in a laudable editing job by Dan Glendenning, Marley seemingly accounts for every notable detail of the musician’s
legacy. Marley is an
absorbing and definitive study of the power of music.